Hey guys, currently have a work flow issue with working with a single catalog with 2 computers (one desktop and one laptop).

My situation is this:

My desktop contains all my master photos with a single catalog. However, due to work commitments there are at times where I need to be away from home for a couple of weeks. So therefore, I export a particular folder (for e.g. London Trip) as a catalog and import it into my laptop so that I can still carry on working on my photos whilst I'm away.

My problem is this:

Upon returning home, the "London Trip" photos I worked on within my laptop during my time away from, I try to reimport the catalog back to my desktop (main computer), but somehow Lightroom on my desktop cannot detect the edits I made on laptop and therefore cannot merge those changes back into the catalog on my desktop.

I try to reimport the catalog back to my desktop (main computer), but somehow Lightroom on my desktop cannot detect the edits I made on laptop and therefore cannot merge those changes back into the catalog on my desktop.

Why not? What commands do you use to do this? What happens? Is there any error message? If so, please quote the error message word-for-word.

Thats where my problem, its greyed out and therefore I can't choose any of the options under number 5 of the help section

I believe this is because the new catalog (the one from my laptop) which is being imported is referring to another hard drive.

This is the part where I'm confused, because Lightroom believes there were "no changes in existing photos", and therefore doesn't allow me to select any options under number 5. But the reality is, I did make changes to the photos, just on another hard drive (my laptop), but wanted to integrate those changes back into the catalog in my desktop

Did you change the names of the photos? Did you do anything to these photos other than edit them on the laptop? Are these the EXACT SAME photos as the ones on your desktop hard drive? Are these exported from your desktop Lightroom?

Did you do anything to these photos other than edit them on the laptop? - No

Are these the EXACT SAME photos as the ones on your desktop hard drive? - No, I copied one set to the desktop and one set to the laptop

Are these exported from your desktop Lightroom? - No, but I think I am getting where you are coming from. My guess is that even though filenames of the photos are the same, Lightroom does not find any relationship in the photos because I copied the photos seperately to each computer respectively from the camera?

3. Put the same SD card into the laptop and imported photos via Lightroom.

When I did the edits on my laptop, I exported those photos using the "export as catalog" function. When I tried to import this catalog to my desktop lightroom, it doesn't seem to be able to recognise I already have these same pictures and therefore, the edits are in a completely seperate folder. The original photos in my desktop catalog remain unchanged.

I think you are stuck with the situation you find yourself in, but honestly, I have never tried this the way you did it, so I cannot offer any further advice. Maybe someone else can jump in with advice